The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  “Coo,” she gurgles. “Coo. Coo.” And closing her blue eyes, she rubs her cheek against Herbie’s shoulder. The tip of her tongue I see protruding from her mouth. The pulp of the fruit, still red.

  Upon returning from our travels through the beautiful cities—after I dreamed in Prague of visiting Kafka’s whore, we flew the next morning to Paris, and three days later to Bruges, where at a conference on modern European literature I read the paper entitled “Hunger Art”—we decide to split the rent on a small house in the country for July and August. How better to spend the summer? But once the decision is made, all I can think about is the time I last lived in daily proximity to a woman, the tomb-like months just before the Hong Kong fiasco, when neither of us could so much as bear the sight of the other’s shoes on the floor of the closet. Consequently, before I sign the lease for the perfect little house that we’ve found, I suggest that probably it would be best not to sublet either of our apartments in the city for the two months—a small financial sacrifice, true, but this way there will always be a place to retreat to if anything untoward should happen. I actually say “untoward.” Claire—prudent, patient, tender Claire—understands well enough what I mean as I jabber on in this vein, the pen in my hand, and the agent who drew up the lease casting unamused glances from the other end of his office. Raised by heavyweight battlers from the day she was born until she was able to leave for school and a life of her own, an independent young woman now since the age of seventeen, she has no argument against having a nest to fly off to, as well as the nest that is to be shared, for so long as the sharing is good. No, we won’t rent our apartments, she agrees. Whereupon, with the solemnity of the Japanese Commander-in-Chief sitting down aboard MacArthur’s battleship to surrender an empire, I affix my signature to the lease.

  A small, two-storied white clapboard farmhouse, then, set halfway up a hillside of dandelions and daisies from a silent, untraveled rural road, and twenty miles north of the Catskill village where I was raised. I have chosen Sullivan County over Cape Cod, and that too is fine with Claire—proximity to the Vineyard and to Olivia seems not to matter to her quite the way it did just the year before. And for me the gentle green hills and distant green mountains beyond the dormer windows take me back to the bedroom vista of my childhood—exactly my view from the room at the top of the “Annex”—and augment the sense I already have with her that I am living at last in accordance with my true spirit, that, indeed, I am “home.”

  And for the spirit what a summer it is! From the daily regimen of swimming in the morning and hiking in the afternoon we each grow more and more fit, while within, day by day, we grow fat as our farmer neighbor’s hogs. How the spirit feasts on just getting up in the morning! on coming to in a whitewashed sunlit room with my arms encircling her large, substantial form. Oh, how I do love the size of her in bed! That tangibility of hers! And the weight of those breasts in my hands! Oh, very different, this, from all the months and months of waking up with nothing to hold on to but my pillow!

  Later—is it not yet eleven? really? we have eaten our cinnamon toast, taken our dip, stopped in town to buy food for dinner, brooded over the newspaper’s front page, and it is only ten-fifteen?—later, from the rocker on the porch where I do my morning writing, I watch her toil in the garden. Two spiral notebooks are arranged beside me. In one I work at planning the projected book on Kafka, to be called, after my Bruges lecture, Hunger Art, while in the other, whose pages I approach with far greater eagerness—and where I am having somewhat more success—I move on to the substance of the lecture whose prologue I had begun composing in the hotel café in Prague, the story of my life in its most puzzling and maddening aspects, my chronicle of the iniquitous, the ungovernable and the thrilling … or (by way of a working title), “How David Kepesh comes to be sitting in a wicker rocker on a screened-in porch in the Catskill Mountains, watching with contentment while a teetotaling twenty-five-year-old sixth-grade teacher from Schenectady, New York, creeps about her flower garden in what appear to be overalls handed down from Tom Sawyer himself, her hair tied back with a snip of green twister seal cut from the coil with which she stakes the swooning begonias, her delicate, innocent Mennonite face, small and intelligent as a raccoon’s, and soil-smudged as though in preparation for Indian night at the Girl Scout jamboree—and his happiness in her hands.”

  “Why don’t you come out and help with the weeds?” she calls—“Tolstoy would have.” “He was a big-time novelist,” I say; “they have to do that sort of thing, to gain Experience. Not me. For me it’s enough to see you crawling on your knees.” “Well, whatever pleases,” she says.

  Ah, Clarissa, let me tell you, all that is pleases. The pond where we swim. Our apple orchard. The thunderstorms. The barbecue. The music playing. Talking in bed. Your grandmother’s iced tea. Deliberating on which walk to take in the morning and which at dusk. Watching you lower your head to peel peaches and shuck corn … Oh, nothing, really, is what pleases. But what nothing! Nations go to war for this kind of nothing, and in the absence of such nothing, people shrivel up and die.

  Of course by now the passion between us is no longer quite what it was on those Sundays when we would cling together in my bed until three in the afternoon—“the primrose path to madness,” as Claire once described those rapacious exertions which end finally with the two of us rising on the legs of weary travelers to change the bed linens, to stand embracing beneath the shower, and then to go out of doors to get some air before the winter sun goes down. That, once begun, our lovemaking should have continued with undiminished intensity for almost a year—that two industrious, responsible, idealistic schoolteachers should have adhered to one another like dumb sea creatures, and, at the moment of overbrimming, have come to the very brink of tearing flesh with cannibalized jaws—well, that is somewhat more than I ever would have dared predict for myself, having already served beyond the call of duty—having already staked so much and lost so much—under the tattered scarlet standard of His Royal Highness, my lust.

  Leveling off. Overheated frenzy subsiding into quiet physical affection. That is how I choose to describe what is happening to our passion during this blissful summer. Can I think otherwise—can I possibly believe that, rather than coming to rest on some warm plateau of sweet coziness and intimacy, I am being eased down a precipitous incline and as yet am nowhere near the cold and lonely cavern where I finally will touch down? To be sure, the faintly brutal element has taken it on the lam; gone is the admixture of the merciless with the tender, those intimations of utter subjugation that one sees in the purplish bruise, the wantonness one thrills to in the coarse word breathed at the peak of pleasure. We no longer succumb to desire, nor do we touch each other everywhere, paw and knead and handle with that unquenchable lunacy so alien to what and who we otherwise are. True, I am no longer a little bit of a beast, she is no longer a little bit of a tramp, neither any longer is quite the greedy lunatic, the depraved child, the steely violator, the helplessly impaled. Teeth, once blades and pincers, the pain-inflicting teeth of little cats and dogs, are simply teeth again, and tongues are tongues, and limbs are limbs. Which is, as we all know, how it must be.

  And I for one will not quarrel, or sulk, or yearn, or despair. I will not make a religion of what is fading away—of my craving for that bowl into which I dip my face as though to extract the last dram of a syrup I cannot guzzle down fast enough … of the harsh excitement of that pumping grip so strong, so rapid, so unyielding, that if I do not moan that there is nothing left of me, that I am stupefied and numb, she will, in that stirring state of fervor bordering on heartlessness, continue until she has milked the very life from my body. I will not make a religion of the marvelous sight of her half-stripped. No, I intend to nurse no illusions about the chance for a great revival of the drama we would seem very nearly to have played out, this clandestine, uncensored, underground theater of four furtive selves—the two who pant in performance, the two who pantingly watch—wherein regard for t
he hygienic, the temperate, and the time of day or night is all so much ridiculous intrusion. I tell you, I am a new man—that is, I am a new man no longer—and I know when my number is up: now just stroking the soft, long hair will do, just resting side by side in our bed each morning will do, awakening folded together, mated, in love. Yes, I am willing to settle on these terms. This will suffice. No more more.

  And before whom am I on my knees trying to strike such a bargain? Who is to decide how far from Claire I am going to slide? Honored members of Literature 341, you would think, as I do, that it would, it should, it must, be me.

  * * *

  Late in the afternoon of one of the loveliest days of August, with nearly fifty such days already stored away in memory and the deep contentment of knowing that there are still a couple dozen more to come, on an afternoon when my feeling of well-being is boundless and I cannot imagine anyone happier or luckier than myself, I receive a visit from my former wife. I will think about it for days afterward, imagining each time the phone rings or I hear the sound of a car turning up the steep drive to the house that it is Helen returning. I will expect to find a letter from her every morning, or rather a letter about her, informing me that she has run off again to Hong Kong, or that she is dead. When I awaken in the middle of the night to remember how once I lived and how I live now—and this still happens to me, too regularly—I will cling to my sleeping partner as though it is she who is ten years my senior—twenty, thirty years my senior—rather than the other way around.

  I am out by the orchard in a canvas lounge chair, my legs in the sun and my head in the shade, when I hear the phone ringing inside the house, where Claire is getting ready to go swimming. I have not yet decided—of such decisions are my days composed—whether I’ll go along with her to the pond, or just stay on quietly doing my work until it is time to water the marigolds and open the wine. Since lunch I have been out here—just myself, the bumblebees, and the butterflies, and, from time to time, Claire’s old Labrador, Dazzle—reading Colette and taking notes for the course known by now around the house as Desire 341. Leafing through a pile of her books, I have been wondering if there has ever been in America a novelist with a point of view toward the taking and giving of pleasure even vaguely resembling Colette’s, an American writer, man or woman, stirred as deeply as she is by scent and warmth and color, someone as sympathetic to the range of the body’s urgings, as attuned to the world’s every sensuous offering, a connoisseur of the finest gradations of amorous feeling, who is nonetheless immune to fanaticism of any sort, except, as with Colette, a fanatical devotion to the self’s honorable survival. Hers seems to have been a nature exquisitely susceptible to all that desire longs for and promises—“these pleasures which are lightly called physical”—yet wholly untainted by puritan conscience, or murderous impulse, or megalomania, or sinister ambitions, or the score-settling rage of class or social grievance. One thinks of her as egotistic, in the sharpest, crispest sense of the word, the most pragmatic of sensualists, her capacity for protective self-scrutiny in perfect balance with the capacity to be carried away—

  The top sheet of my yellow pad is spattered and crisscrossed with the fragmentary beginnings of a lecture outline—running down one margin is a long list of modern novelists, European as well as American, among whom Colette’s decent, robust, bourgeois paganism still seems to me unique—when Claire comes out of the kitchen’s screen door, wearing her bathing suit and carrying her white terry-cloth robe over her arm.

  The book in her hand is Musil’s Young Törless, the copy I’d just finished marking up the night before. How delighted I am with her curiosity about these books I will be teaching! And to look up at the swell of her breasts above the bikini’s halter, well, that is yet another of this wonderful day’s satisfactions.

  “Tell me,” I say, taking hold of the calf of her nearest leg, “why is there no American Colette? Or could it be Updike who comes the closest? It’s surely not Henry Miller. It’s surely not Hawthorne.”

  “A phone call for you,” she says. “Helen Kepesh.”

  “My God.” I look at my watch, for all the help that will give. “What time would it be in California? What can she want? How did she find me?”

  “It’s a local call.”

  “Is it?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  I haven’t yet moved from the chair. “And that’s what she said, Helen Kepesh?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought she’d taken her own name back.”

  Claire shrugs.

  “You told her I was here?”

  “Do you want me to tell her you aren’t?”

  “What can she want?”

  “You’ll have to ask her,” says Claire. “Or maybe you won’t.”

  “Would it be so very wrong of me just to go in there and put the phone back on the hook?”

  “Not wrong,” says Claire. “Only unduly anxious.”

  “But I feel unduly anxious. I feel unduly happy. This is all so perfect.” I spread ten fingers across the soft swell of flesh above her halter. “Oh, my dear, dear pal.”

  “I’ll wait out here,” she says.

  “And I will go swimming with you.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  “So wait!”

  It would be neither cruel nor cowardly, I tell myself, looking down at the phone on the kitchen table—it would just be the most sensible thing I could do. Except, of the half-dozen people closest to my life, Helen happens still to be one. “Hello,” I say.

  “Hello. Oh, hello. Look, I feel odd about phoning you, David. I almost didn’t. Except I seem to be in your town. We’re at the Texaco station; across from a real-estate office.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m afraid it was just too hard driving off without even calling. How are you?”

  “How did you know I was staying here?”

  “I tried you in New York a few days ago. I called the college, and the department secretary said she wasn’t authorized to give out your summer address. I said I was a former student and I was sure you wouldn’t mind. But she was adamant about Professor Kepesh’s privacy. Quite a moat, that lady.”

  “So how did you find me?”

  “I called the Schonbrunns.”

  “My, my.”

  “But stopping off here for gas is really just accidental. Strange, I know, but true. And not as strange, after all, as the truly strange things that happen.”

  She is lying and I’m not charmed. Through the window I can see Claire holding the unopened book in her hand. We could already be in the car on the way down to the pond.

  “What do you want, Helen?”

  “You mean from you? Nothing; nothing at all. I’m married now.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “That’s what I was doing in New York. We were visiting my husband’s family. We’re on our way to Vermont. They have a summer house there.” She laughs; a very appealing laugh. It makes me remember her in bed. “Can you believe I’ve never been to New England?”

  “Well,” I say, “it’s not exactly Rangoon.”

  “Neither is Rangoon any more.”

  “How is your health? I heard that you were pretty sick.”

  “I’m better now. I had a hard time for a while. But it’s over. How are you?”

  “My hard time is over too.”

  “I’d like to see you, if I could. Are we that far from your house? I’d like to talk to you, just for a little—”

  “About what?”

  “I owe you some explanations.”

  “You don’t. No more than I owe you any. I think we’d both be better off at this late date without the explanations.”

  “I was mad, David, I was going crazy— David, these are difficult things to say surrounded by cans of motor oil.”

  “Then don’t say them.”

  “I have to.”

  Out on my chair, Claire is now leafing through the Times.

  “You better go swimming w
ithout me,” I say. “Helen’s coming here; with her husband.”

  “She’s married?”

  “So she says.”

  “Why was it Helen ‘Kepesh’ then?”

  “Probably to identify herself to you. To me.”

  “Or to herself,” says Claire. “Would you rather I weren’t here?”

  “Of course not. I meant I thought you’d prefer going swimming.”

  “Only if you prefer—”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Down in town.”

  “She came all this way—? I don’t understand. What if we hadn’t been at home?”

  “She says they’re on their way to his family’s house in Vermont.”

  “They didn’t take the Thruway?”

  “Honey, what’s happened to you? No, they didn’t take the Thruway. Maybe they’re taking the back roads for the scenery. What’s the difference? They’ll come and they’ll go. You were the one who told me not to be unduly anxious.”

  “But I wouldn’t want you to be hurt.”

  “Don’t worry. If that’s why you’re staying—”

  Here suddenly she stands, and at the edge of tears (where I have never before seen her!) she says, “Look, you so obviously want me out of the way—” Quickly she starts toward where our car is parked on the other side of the house, in the dust bowl by the old collapsing barn. And I run after her, just behind the dog, who thinks it is all a game.

  Consequently we are beside the barn, waiting together, when the Lowerys arrive. As their car makes its way up the long dirt drive to the house, Claire slips her terry-cloth robe on over her bathing suit. I am wearing a pair of corduroy shorts, a faded old T-shirt, battered sneakers, an outfit I’ve probably had since Syracuse. Helen will have no trouble recognizing me. But will I recognize her? Can I explain to Claire—should I have?—that really, all I want is to see …

  I had heard that, on top of all her debilitating ailments, she had gained some twenty pounds. If so, she has by now lost all that weight, and a bit more. She emerges from the car looking exactly like herself. She is paler-complexioned than I remember—or rather, she is not pale in the cleansed, Quakerish way to which I am now accustomed. Helen’s pallor is luminous, transparent. Only in the thinness of her arms and neck is there any indication that she has been through a bad time with her health, and, what is more, is now a woman in her mid-thirties. Otherwise, she is the Stunning Creature once again.